2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
Using the SharePoint Intranet Portal to Reach, and Reach Out to,
Clients at OPIC
By Christopher Lee Cochran, Business and Industry Librarian, Overseas Private
Investment Corporation
When the Information Center (IC) staff at the Overseas Private Investment
Corporation (OPIC), a U.S. government corporation, was asked to be the beta test
site for the agency’s new SharePoint intranet portal in 2009, we eagerly accepted
the challenge. Under the new SharePoint information architecture, each department
at OPIC would assume ownership responsibilities of its intranet page, not only for
the obvious content creation responsibilities, but also for managing the content:
uploading new content, editing existing content, and deleting outdated content.
While general intranet design features had already been worked out by the Chief
Information Officer’s (CIO) office, with input from OPIC staff, the content
development and maintenance of each individual page would be transferred to the
relevant department. The CIO reached out to the Information Center and asked us
to be the test site for this new process, since we were, by definition, an
information-rich office that was already focused on creating, sharing, and
maintaining digital content for our clients. As with so many things in the
government, the rollout of the new OPIC intranet was timed to coincide with the
start of a new fiscal year, and we were given a short timeframe to complete the
transfer to SharePoint. Our existing web page had become outdated and was sorely
in need of updating, so the challenge of a deadline was just the impetus we needed
to update and create web versions of our print guidelines, check for dead links on
our reference resources page, and create new information products that would
highlight our expertise and contributions to OPIC’s work.
Certain elements of each intranet page at OPIC were designed to be as uniform
across all departments as possible. The basic design was a three-paned page with a
banner across the top. The banner was to be fairly static, except each department
could put in images that reflected the general focus of their department (IC staff
took photos within the IC and worked with the IT department to create a
representative photo collage) (Figure 1). The left side navigation pane would
feature static sections such as “Who We Are” and “What We Do.” The Information
Center also included sections in the left side navigation pane featuring policy
guidelines for some of our services.
The right side navigation pane was reserved for each department to populate with
document collections, forms, links, and resource guides specific to that department.
IC staff felt it was important to have search access to our catalog available right
from our home page, so an online catalog search box was added to the top of the
right pane as well. Links to our digital collections, subscription databases,
recommended links, and resource guides round out the right side pane. (Figure 1)